


Your Father's Son

by altschmerzes



Series: Cairo Week 2020 (The Crossover Special) [3]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bombs, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode AU: s01e06 Wrench, Gen, Interrogation, Mistaken Identity, Not James MacGyver Friendly, Patty and others on the BAU team also appear, somewhat loosely inspired by prodigal son, the ghost is slightly different than in canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:35:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23750152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altschmerzes/pseuds/altschmerzes
Summary: A serial bomber called the Ghost has descended on greater Los Angeles and it's fallen to the FBI's behavioral analysis unit to figure out who he is. Thanks to his skills and a run of bad luck, suspicion lands squarely on Angus MacGyver. It doesn't help that one of the agents interrogating him is the same man who'd arrested his father years ago, at the end of a string of killings that left sixteen people dead and James serving a life sentence.Mac is left to convince the BAU that while his father may have been a killer, he isn't. The stakes only get higher when a call informs both the FBI team and Mac that the Ghost's latest bomb has been located, and Jack Dalton is standing right on top of it.(for cairo week day 7- "au")
Series: Cairo Week 2020 (The Crossover Special) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1703446
Comments: 28
Kudos: 140





	Your Father's Son

**Author's Note:**

> i feel a little bad for this one, because really, this sucks for everyone involved and the bau team has no way of knowing what's going on here. they're good people, they just don't have the whole picture, and mac can't exactly give it to 'em. also, i've altered the ghost somewhat from canon, but not majorly so, just in where and when he operates. 
> 
> at any rate - enjoy an out of order number seven of my seven crossover oneshots for cairo week, hosted over on tumblr! i will be doing the other four still, despite having got too caught up to do them on the days themselves, but wanted to finish the actual week out with a bang.

> _A million choices, though little on their own_
> 
> _Become the heirloom of the heaviness you've known_
> 
> _You are so much more than your father's son_
> 
> _\- Sleeping at Last, "Heirloom"_

The interrogation room at the Los Angeles Police Department is not a comfortable place. The chair is hard and unforgiving, the blue-grey walls and washed out lighting give the whole place a dour feeling, and it’s far colder than Mac would personally prefer it to be. It’s a tactic, he knows it is, a deliberately unsettling place to be, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with, and he’s not quite sure why this is where he’s been left. This isn’t the kind of place that people who are just being ‘interviewed’ are kept, that’s for sure.

Mac has been alone here for some time now. He wants to ask what’s going on, why things are taking so long and what’s with the hostile accommodations, but there’s no one around to ask. There hasn’t been, since a uniformed officer led him here and wordlessly closed the door behind him. According to his watch, Mac has now been here for over an hour, and he wants to know what’s going on. 

More than that, though, Mac wants to go home. He wants to hear about Bozer’s latest script problem and serve as a sounding board to talk it out with, wants to ask Riley about the latest upgrade she’s made to her rig just to hear her voice come alive when she talks about something she’s really good at, wants to talk to Jack for any reason at all just so he’ll feel less unnerved and alone. Those things started running through his head around minute thirty, when it was really starting to set in that something is very wrong here, and he hadn’t been brought in so insistently, in the middle of such a crucial case, just for a few questions.

When they’d asked, it had been pretty clear that ‘no’ wasn’t an option, so Patty had ordered him to go. Mac hadn’t wanted to, not with things still so unresolved, the Ghost still out there and the trail so fresh, but Patty hadn’t budged. And so here he is. In an interrogation room, when he should be out with his team, being ignored by the FBI.

Looking over at the two-way glass, Mac stares at his own reflection. If he could see right through it, he knows someone else would be there. There’s no way they’ve left him here like this, alone, by accident. No, someone is definitely watching him, and it’s a prickling, unnerving feeling. Mac hates it. He wishes they’d just come back already - the sooner they get this over with, the sooner he’s back out there with his team searching for the Ghost. 

When the door finally opens, two people enter together. The first is the agent he’d spoken to on the phone when he’d first gotten the call - _Angus MacGyver, this is Agent Derek Morgan with the FBI, we need to ask you a few questions about recent bombing activity, if you could come down to the station,_ the kind of invitation that can’t even remotely be mistaken for a request. The second is someone he doesn’t recognize, a woman. 

“You and Agent Morgan have already met,” the woman says as she takes a seat, Morgan doing so as well. “I’m Agent Emily Prentiss. You’re Angus MacGyver, correct?”

“It’s Mac,” he corrects stiffly, more on instinct than anything else. Whether or not these people get his name right is not really his chief concern, but spend enough time automatically correcting almost everyone you meet and it becomes a hard habit to break. 

“Right,” Prentiss says amiably. “Mac, then. Okay. Now, do you know what we’re here to talk about?”

“You said it was about the bombs, when we spoke on the phone,” Mac answers, looking to Morgan, who nods, confirming. 

“It is. It’s about the Ghost.”

There’s a folder in Prentiss’s hands that she sets on the table in front of her now, a thick folder, the kind Mac has seen at a hundred mission briefings, thumbed through on the plane. She doesn’t take anything out of it at first, just lays her hands over it and talks. Taking turns, Morgan and Prentiss go through a basic overview of the Ghost, the case their team is working looking for him. 

It’s all information Mac already knows though he can’t tell them this, given there’s no reason he should know it, if his profession wasn’t brought up. Patty had made it clear in no uncertain terms - they don’t find out who he is and what he does. He’s an engineer with a think tank, nothing more. And engineers don’t know about people like the Ghost.

They explain that their team is chasing a serial bomber who’d operated in a dozen different countries and recently arrived in Los Angeles, beginning a spate of targeted attacks that have been terrorizing greater LA. The tone is conversational at first, but shifts as time goes on, as Prentiss flips open the folder and shows him a photo from the scene of yesterday’s explosion. Both of them are watching him with shrewd eyes, picking up every minute expression on his face and movement of his body, and Mac knows. 

He looks at the two-way glass, looks back at the agents, at the folder, their carefully guarded posture, their riveted attention, and he knows.

“You can’t possibly think that’s me,” Mac says, incredulousness seeping thick into his voice. He should’ve predicted it from the start but somehow this was an outcome he hadn’t seen coming, that someone might someday come to the conclusion that he _is_ the Ghost. “I- I live in Los Angeles, yeah, but how would I have gotten all those places? You just said he’s operated all over.”

“You have a tendency to disappear, Mac,” Prentiss tells him. The photo is tucked back into her folder and her hands are laid over it once more, and though her voice is still ostensibly light and even, there’s something sharp at the edge of it now. “Everywhere we go these days, we leave a massive footprint, proving that we’ve been there. And yours… Yours goes off the grid for days or sometimes weeks at a time, and you know what else, is we keep seeing your records appear in other places. Not much, just blips, flashes of appearing and disappearing again. What we can’t seem to find is where exactly you’re going, and what you’re doing there.”

“I travel a lot for work.” There’s nothing about this situation that doesn’t feel completely ludicrous. Mac can’t believe this is happening, and he doesn’t know what to do or to say. Not when the actual answers are classified beyond anything these people can know about, leaving him without recourse aside from insufficient half-truths that barely scratch the surface.

The door opens then and another man steps in, letting it close softly behind him. The newcomer doesn’t say anything, doesn’t pass on a message to what Mac now realizes are his interrogators, nor does he join them. He just stands in the corner and watches, silently. What’s more unnerving still is the way Mac feels like there’s something distinctly familiar about him, a recognition he can’t quite place. There’s no time to concentrate too hard on it, either, because Prentiss is responding.

“For work, right, at the…” She unclips the pen from the top of the folder, using the tip to lift the cover and squint down at something in it. Prentiss doesn’t sound impressed when she finishes, “At the think tank.”

“I didn’t…” Mac’s lips feel numb, his fingertips buzzing. “You can’t _seriously_ think I have anything to do with this. I’m not the Ghost, you can’t…”

“Look at it from our perspective here.” It’s Morgan’s turn again, apparently. He’s leaned back in his chair, arm propped over the back of it almost casually. “It’s just that wherever it is you are, Mac, things just seem to blow up. All the way back to your high school football field. Explosions, they just follow you.”

If he hadn’t been already, Mac can definitely feel himself starting to panic now. They really think he hurt these people, the people who’ve been injured or killed in blasts caused by the Ghost, the same man he’s wanted to get his own hands on for years. They think he did this. They actually, _actually_ think he did this. The realization rises in his throat, nauseating and heavy and thudding like a heartbeat.

“I had nothing to do with any of this,” he insists, hoping he doesn’t sound as frantic as he feels. “I was- I served as an EOD technician!”

“So you know your way around a bomb.” Morgan shrugs, and Mac’s chest goes tight. “Wouldn’t be the first time one of the good guys went bad. We’ve seen it all. Soldiers, cops, doctors, hell, firefighters who turn out to be serial arsonists.” Now he sits up and leans forward, posture copying Prentiss and his focus just as intense, turned straight on Mac. “I was with the ATF for a while, I’ve seen bombs. These…”

Like she’s moving on cue, Prentiss takes a few photos from her folder, laying them out on the table between Mac’s side and hers, oriented towards him. They’re evidence photos, fragments of a device laid out and neatly labeled, then arranged into a reconstruction. He recognizes it, though he doesn’t know exactly what incident it was tied to. It’s one of the Ghost’s no question.

“The construction on these,” says Morgan, tapping a finger over the array of splintered metal, “is meticulous. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Do you know what that tells me?”

A squirming feeling in his gut, Mac gets the definite impression that Morgan is going to answer whether he wants to know or not. So he just keeps quiet and tries to stifle the rising panic, not let it get to him lest they mistake it for guilt. 

“The materials used, they’re unusual. They’re in combinations I’ve never encountered, like this guy is building puzzles, not bombs. We’re able to look at work like this and figure out some things about the guy who did it. Build a profile of the sort of person we’re looking for.” Mac knows what a profile is but he doesn’t say so, letting Morgan keep talking while he focuses on breathing, drawing air in and letting it out again. “And the person who did this, he’s _very_ smart. He’s probably polite, he’s highly organized in his thinking, and he’s brilliant. Probably has a skilled job with a lot of time left to his own devices, or people who don’t know enough about what he’s doing to ask questions about what he’s building.” 

“We’ve spoken to your friends.”

Fear twists in Mac again at Prentiss’s interjection, sharper and sicker, and there’s an invisible hand on his throat. It goes tighter as she continues, constricting every time she reads a name off the paper in front of her. 

“We made some phone calls, talked to Jack Dalton, Riley Davis, Wilt Bozer. All of them described you in some pretty complimentary terms. Basically sung your praises, especially after they worked out why we were calling. They seemed to think we were stupid to even consider you for this - and that’s some pretty heavy censoring on what Dalton said about it.”

Something in Mac unknots and relaxes. He has just enough time to feel a small amount of relief before Prentiss continues, reading from what must be notes on the calls they’d made to his friends, likely while they’d kept him waiting there. 

“‘Smartest guy I’ve ever met,’ that was Mr. Dalton. He told us you could build just about anything from the stuff you’d dig out of a junk drawer. Your roommate, Wilt Bozer, told us how nice you are. Said nobody who’s met you in person could have a bad word to say about you. Polite. Ms. Davis wouldn’t really say much at all, just that you were, quote, ‘Brilliant and one of the good guys.’” 

It doesn’t escape Mac for a moment, the way she’s mirroring the language of the profile, and the relief in him turns into dread. The words they had used to try to defend him are being twisted, interpreted into a condemnation they had no way of knowing they were handing down. 

“So, according to your friends,” says Morgan, jumping back in, “you’re a nice, polite guy who is off the charts intelligent and knows his way around building stuff. And then there’s the matter of your father.”

The moment Morgan says the word, Mac’s blood runs ice cold. The picture is laid out between them and Mac can’t look at it, not beyond the first glance it takes to tell what it is. He’s seen the mugshot over and over again, the thin press of the angry mouth, the harsh blue eyes. It had been in newspapers and on TV for weeks. 

“He has quite the body count, your old man. A bomber himself, among other things. Who knows what kind of instructions he could’ve left for you before we caught him - you know that was someone on our team, right? Been a while now, but he still remembers the case, don’t you, Rossi?” Morgan looks over his shoulder at the man still standing silent in the corner, who nods. 

It clicks in an instant. Where Mac knows him from. This is the man who’d come to interview him, after they were onto him but before James was arrested. 

“I’m not like him.” The protest comes out weak even to Mac’s ears, another defense he hadn’t meant to offer, just as instinctive as the correction of his name. 

Ignoring the statement, Rossi brings another chair over to sit down on Morgan’s other side. He still doesn’t say anything, just watches while Morgan launches back into his speech, talking about types of bombers now.

“We categorize things,” he’s saying. “Different kinds of killers into different pathologies, helps us figure out who we’re looking for and why they might be doing what they’re doing. Bombers generally come in four kinds. Criminal, group cause, psychologically disorganized, and personal cause.”

Mac expects him to elaborate, to explain which of these categories he’s supposed to fall in, but he doesn’t. Instead, things take a different turn.

“Your father is in prison, and he’s never getting out,” Rossi tells him.

“Yeah, I know.” As if Mac could spend a day of his life not acutely aware of this fact, of what his last name means to the people who know it from the news, of the vile heirloom he’s been passed down. 

“He was arrested shortly after you returned from your tour in Afghanistan.” 

“Yeah,” Mac says again, voice clipped and sharp. “I remember. You’re the one who interviewed me.” He’s trying not to let it get through, the way this is all affecting him, being accused all but outright of being the Ghost despite the ways he’s been personally tormented by the man’s work, and now his father being brought up. 

With a clarity of the kind of memory that will never fade, no matter how many years pass, Mac can remember when he’d gotten the knock on his front door. It had happened during those unsteady and off balance weeks he spent when he first got home trying to adjust back to a life he’d barely started before he’d gone overseas, and taken him by surprise. When he’d answered it had been two members of the FBI waiting for him outside his and Bozer’s house. And then came the interview. 

An actual interview, without the harshness or accusations of this one, it had lasted for upwards of an hour while Mac tried to answer their questions. He had no idea where his father was and even less of an idea where he could be hiding out. The information of what they were pursuing James for had sent Mac reeling, the pictures he’d glimpsed through a window with the blinds only half flattened, tacked up on corkboards. 

Pictures of the smiling faces of victims. His father’s victims.

Agent Rossi had interviewed him with a stern kindness that had been somewhat reassuring at the time. It had reminded him a little of what Jack was like during his more serious moments, the way Rossi had treated Mac while guiding him those first few steps into a brand new reality, one where he is the son of a killer and the bodies kept piling up. By the time Mac got the call, pacing agitatedly on his back porch with Bozer and Jack watching him in alarm, they were too late to save James’s final target. 

After a moment’s hesitation, Rossi had told him over the phone that they were tentatively putting the body count at fourteen. By the time the trial started, they found two more. Sixteen people whose names Mac will never be able to forget, sixteen people James had killed while still to this day refusing to explain why.

None of that remembered warmth is present in Rossi’s voice now. No, now his voice has gone hard and authoritative as he continues. “James MacGyver hasn’t taken a visitor since he was arrested. We know you tried to go and see him at Pelican Bay, just once, right after the trial. I bet you had a lot of questions for him, after he took off when you were a kid, and then with his conviction. But he wouldn’t budge, not even for you. That had to hurt.”

It had, in more ways than Mac has the words to describe. Though Rossi is wrong about one thing. After all of that, Mac hadn’t had a lot of questions for his father. All he’d had was one. Why?

“A lot of people do a lot of drastic things to get their parents’ attention.” It’s Prentiss again, looking back in her folder. “I mean, me, I just got a really bad blowout and started wearing a lot of black lipstick, but you… Maybe you decided to go for something a bit harder to overlook. A personal cause.”

Then there are pictures, flicked out on the table in front of him. Sunbursts of orange fire, more evidence trays of pieces all arranged and labeled. A building with a hole in the side, like a giant took a bite out of it or reached in and swiped a handful of brick and mortar, leaving the corner with a gaping wound. Picture after picture of rubble and destruction, piling on top of each other. 

“Got to admit, that’s the kind of message it would be pretty hard to ignore.”

Mac would deny it, would vehemently swear up, down, and sideways that he had nothing to do with any of this, that he would give his right arm to catch the Ghost, but there’s no air in his lungs with which to do so. The picture they’ve painted here… it makes sense. His expertise in the field. His gaps upon gaps of unexplained time. The sheer volume of incident reports he’s sure his name has come up in, the way things seem to burn wherever he goes. Mac has explanations for all of it, but he can’t give any of them, caught between knowing the truth that would exonerate him and being completely unable to use it. 

“It’s over now.” That’s Rossi, and some of the voice from before is back, his tone gentling as he stacks some of the pictures, moves them to the side. He folds his hands on the table between them and leans forward a little, talking in a low, conciliatory voice. 

It’s almost kind of funny how understanding the strategy doesn’t necessarily make it any less effective. Almost.

“We can help you.” Unable to help himself, Mac laughs shortly, and Rossi ignores it, going on. “We can get a message to your father. Tell us where the bomb is and, I'll personally make sure that James hears whatever it is you need to say to him.”

“Wait,” Mac says, thrown. Anything he’d been about to say about what Rossi was saying about James, about his supposed ‘personal cause’ motive for committing the bombings, goes straight out the window when he hears that. “Where the bomb is?”

“We know your next bomb is out there already,” returns Rossi with the kind of shaming patience of someone who knows the person they’re speaking to has just been caught in a very obvious lie. “We’ve identified your pattern. There’s no point in trying to deny it, we know you’ve already set it.”

The news has sent Mac reeling, trying to process what it means if they’re right. Prentiss and Morgan exchange a look he doesn’t have the spare bandwidth to try and interpret, but Rossi doesn’t back down.

“Tell us where the bomb is, Mac.”

“I don’t know.”

“We just need you to tell us, and we can-”

“Look!” Mac snaps, voice rising almost to a shout. “I don’t want you to contact me father for me, I don’t want to contact him at _all,_ I am not the Ghost, and I don’t know where the bomb is. You have to believe me, I’m telling the truth.”

“How can we believe you?” asks Prentiss. She hefts her folder up, showing the stack to him, flicking the papers to emphasize their abundance. “Just give us an explanation, a version of all of this that makes sense when _nothing_ about you adds up.”

“I can’t. I want to, I really do, but I can’t.” Not shockingly, they don’t buy it, and Mac is rapidly losing hope.

It isn’t at all that he thinks there’s a chance he’ll really be convicted for anything he didn’t do, not once the actual evidence is processed and whatever legal team Matty will put together for him gets a hack at it. But he can’t wait that long for the same reason he supposes these people feel they need to conduct this interrogation with such urgency rather than just arresting him and calling it a day. If there’s another bomb out there, there just isn’t time to wait for it to all get sorted out. 

Somewhere out there, Mac’s team is surely combing the city, continuing to work the way Patty told them to when he got the call summoning him in. They’ll be hurtling through their own investigation at the speed of light, and they need Mac there with them. He’s gone up against the Ghost before, he knows the man’s bombs, and they need him.

The interrogation is exhausting. Mac is exhausted, he’s scared and frayed and he wants Jack to walk in the door, he wants to go home, wants to see his family, but wants something else even more urgently. Before he can do any of that, can sit down and relax and let this whole awful day melt off his shoulders, he has to see it through, to make sure that whatever bomb is out there, if they’re right and it is, doesn’t have the chance to hurt anyone. Certainly not anyone he loves.

Rossi is in the middle of another question Mac can’t answer when a blond woman bursts into the room, the door clattering against the wall as it swings wide open. 

“JJ, what-” Morgan starts before he’s cut off.

“It’s not him.”

When it hits him, the relief is so strong that Mac nearly goes toppling out of his chair and onto the floor. A fraction of a moment later, his brain catches up, and he wonders how exactly it is she knows that, when all the proof Mac has is proof he can’t offer. 

“How do you…” trails off Prentiss, obviously wondering the same thing, though presumably for much different reasons. 

“Because Hotch has him on the phone, right now. Come on, this isn’t our guy.”

They’re out of the room in what feels like an instant, and Mac jumps up quickly to follow them. He trails the four agents down the hall and to a conference room they’d presumably been using as a temporary investigation headquarters, arriving right as the phone call is ending.

“Hotch, that was him?” Morgan is asking just as Mac reaches the doorway. “But nobody’s heard him talk, how did you…”

“Automated voice,” Hotch tells him, phone still held up where he’d just been hung up on. “I think he was using some kind of text-to-speech software.”

“Could it have been-”

The second question doesn’t get much farther than the first, the man already shaking his head. “A recording? No, he was answering questions in real time.”

“And you’re sure it was him and not just some kind of hoax?”

“He knew the compounds, back and forth, for the last six of the Ghost’s bombs. Rattled them off without hardly having to think about it, it was him.”

“I can help you find him.” Mac speaks up. It’s a risk, he knows they’re going to escort him out, tell him to get lost, but he pushes, interrupting before they can. “Listen, I can’t explain to you how I know what I know or who I work for, but my job isn’t that different from yours, and if you want to catch this guy, I’m your best shot. I know his bombs, I've had them in my hands, there’s a reason you thought he was me. I’m the next best you’re going to get to actually having the guy here himself. So are you going to let me help, or are you going to risk the lives of anyone in this city?”

There’s a long pause. It seems like there’s a conversation happening in silent looks until the man who’d been holding the phone, the one Mac heard called Hotch, nods curtly.

“Let him in,” he orders, apparently in some way in charge here. “Watch him, but let him in.”

Morgan stops him as Mac walks past, a light touch on his elbow. “Hey,” he says, and Mac fights down the urge to immediately bristle. It turns out to be a good instinct, given what he says next. “Sorry about that. In there. We had to…”

“You had to do your job,” Mac finishes for him. He wishes he could manage a smile, but just gets his mouth to purse, one edge pulling slightly up. “I know. It’s okay.”

There’s an odd look on Morgan’s face, like he doesn’t seem to think this is okay, like maybe he has something more to keep saying about it, but he just nods, and lets Mac keep going. Time is of the essence, and further apologies for accusations of murder and interrogations will have to wait.

The first thing Mac zeroes in on is a map pinned up to a far wall. There are circles drawn over it, stenciled in dry-erase marker and shaded in using a handful of different types of crosshatching. The man working on the map looks about as much like a federal agent as Mac himself does, introduces himself as Dr. Reid, and launches into an explanation of the map and the circles. He talks a mile a minute and doesn’t spare a moment to look at Mac oddly for having just been their prime suspect - he can still see his own photo, pinned to a board across the room - just dives immediately into the situation at hand.

It’s not often Mac meets someone who seems to speak the same language he does, and he gets the distinct feeling that if it weren’t for the circumstances, he would like Dr. Reid a lot. 

As he listens to the explanations, a brief overview of what they’re working with to locate the device they firmly believe is already out in the city somewhere, Mac takes the time to update his team. He sends out a quick text, ignoring the barrage of messages he’d received while his phone was out of service in the interrogation room, letting them know he’s with the FBI at their temporary field office, and they have intel that might be useful. Any intel is good intel in a case like this one, and it’s not often Mac gets the opportunity to see what someone else’s crack at his mission would look like. 

Mac is in the middle of answering questions about the Ghost and what he knows of the mystery man’s habits and quirks, when he gets the phone call. It buzzes urgently in his pocket and when he fishes it out there’s Riley’s name plastered across the screen. He answers it quickly, and before he can say anything, she’s already talking.

“You have to get down here right now.” It sounds urgent and scared, and Mac has a very bad feeling. 

“What’s going on?”

“Jack’s on it.”

“Jack’s on what?” Mac can feel his heart lurching and thundering in his chest like he already knows what she’s about to say before she says it. Everyone in the room is staring at him but he ignores them, focused solely on Riley and the news she’s about to deliver.

“The bomb. Jack is standing on the Ghost’s bomb.”

Mac almost drops his phone.

Though the drive from the temporary base of operations to the bomb’s location is only minutes, it feels to Mac like an eternity, every second separating him from the scene an intolerable risk. He stays on the phone with Riley the whole time, giving her questions and instructions to relay to Jack. Hopefully it will help to have some idea of what they’re working with before he arrives, to make up some of the lost time. Mac arrives at the taped off street flanked by the entirety of the FBI team who immediately fan out to begin whatever their part of this day is going to be. All except Morgan, who stays with him.

When Mac looks at him, the man shakes his head. “Bomb squad, remember? Might need more hands.”

When they reaches the small huddled group around what looks like an LAPD tactical van, exactly as had been described on the phone, Riley whips around immediately, looking just as stricken and scared as she had on the phone.

“Mac! You’re here!” 

Behind her comes another voice, drawling from the open doors of the truck. “Is that Mac? Oh thank God, cause I’m startin’ to get tired of just standing here, y’know. Little tedious.”

The instant he sees it, Mac’s heart’s frantic beating stops. For a moment it feels like it stops entirely. Jack is there, in the back of that truck, standing on a plate set into the floor. Mac can see the wires protruding slightly from under it, the wide-eyed fear stark on Jack's face. That’s not a way he’s used to seeing Jack look, and it physically hurts to see him like this, so far from his usual determinedly happy go lucky, unshakeable self.

“Who’s that with you, making new friends without me, Mac?” Jack doesn’t sound quite like himself, voice too strained, though he’s obviously trying to speak as normally as possible, forcing jokes that land flat. 

“My name is Derek Morgan, I’m with the FBI,” Morgan explains, and thunder crosses Jack’s face immediately.

“Oh, you’re with the team who thought my boy here was the one building these suckers? Well, let me tell you-”

Riley interrupts him before he can finish whatever he’d been about to say. “Jack, can this wait for a time you’re not literally standing on a bomb, _please?”_

“She’s right,” Mac says, finally sorting through the screeching and grinding gears in his brain to the point of being able to speak without his voice cracking. “Besides, Agent Morgan has experience with explosives, and I can use all the help I can get. Cause right now, I’ve gotta find that bomb just… Jack?” 

“What is it?”

Mac wants to say a thousand different things, all of them crowded up in his chest until he feels like his lungs are going to burst. He doesn’t say any of them, forcing it all down and opting instead for what he hopes is the obvious. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back, and until I say it’s safe, you cannot move a muscle. Understand?”

Jack nods, and Mac takes off, darting around the vehicle, Morgan close on his heels. It’s not hard to locate the explosives themselves. They’re packed into a compartment in the side of the truck, and when he gets eyes on them, the sheer volume and the way they’re crammed in there, Mac feels his knees go weak. Morgan seizes the back of his jacket like he thought Mac was about to fall, and Mac is kind of glad he did. He thought he might be able to fall too, for a moment. It feels like it’s all crashing into him now, seeing it there in front of him, the magnitude of what they’re dealing with. 

“I should’ve been here,” Mac says. He feels light-headed and distant, like time has somehow slowed to a stop while simultaneously racing around him. The air is thick and hard to breathe. “I should’ve been here helping them look, maybe I could’ve seen the plate and stopped him from-”

“Hey. Stop.” Morgan’s voice, cutting his sentence short, forceful but not unkind. “Listen okay, you need to blame someone for not being here, you go ahead and blame us, but you do that later.”

_Focus on what can kill you now._ That’s what Pena had always said, right from Mac’s first day in training. _Focus on what can kill you now._

“You’re right,” Mac mutters. “Yeah, you’re right.” He starts to head back and Morgan stops him, the hand at his back grabbing his jacket again, arresting his movement before he can make it farther than a step. It’s surprising, and Mac frowns, about to say something, only to be stopped when Morgan shakes his head, keeping his grip.

“You cannot go back around this car freaking out. I don’t know who the hell you people are but this is your team, right?” They nod together as Mac confirms what Morgan obviously already knows. “Okay, then he needs to see you calm. You’re his one shot to get out of here. So dig deep, find that calm place every bomb tech I’ve ever met has had, and save your team. Everything else has to go out of your mind. Don’t think about the interrogation, which was our mistake, and don’t think about your father, cause he isn’t here. Who’s here is those people over there, and they need you. Got it?”

It’s a good point, Mac has to concede. He swallows hard and nods, feeling the hand release him and swaying a moment on his feet. Once he’s steady and clear, Mac nods again, and heads back around the truck. His explanation is hurried but calm, telling them what he’d seen in the compartment, and eyeing the wires he’d seen under the plate, calculating which to cut first. It’s a decision easy enough to make, and Mac moves to cut the wire that will render the explosives safe and get Jack out of there in one piece.

As he stands with his Swiss Army knife pulled open to the scissors, small blades threaded carefully around the correct wire, something stops him. Mac remembers Pena's voice, back in training, a hundred times again after that, as if the man himself is standing over his shoulder, watching him. Stopping him before he can make a fatal mistake. _See things for what they are, not what they seem to be._

“What do you see, Mac?” It’s Morgan, behind him, and as Mac's eyes flick around, he sees it.

The vent. There’s never just one bomb. Not with the Ghost.

The moment Jack twists to open up the vent, Mac is pretty sure this is what it feels like to simultaneously have a heart attack and a stroke. He yells at the same time Patty and Riley do, and he’s pretty sure he even hears Morgan’s voice, lurching into the fray. 

“Slowly,” he snaps. His pulse is rocketing in his throat, though he’s faintly pleased to see that his hand, when he passes the Swiss Army knife with the screwdriver extended up to Jack, doesn’t shake. Still, he says it again as he hands it over, voice barely a breath. “Slowly.” 

It’s exactly like he thought it would be. Disarming the plate detonates the vent bomb, and Jack still dies. Looking at the whole setup, Mac flashes through a hundred different scenarios in a moment, a hundred different ways the next few minutes could go, and none of them end anywhere but in pieces. 

“Mac.” The voice next to him takes his attention away from Riley, vehement in her expression of how much she hates all of what’s happening right now, and Mac makes eye contact with Morgan. The expression says what the man doesn’t, reminding Mac of what he’d said on the other side of the truck. 

Find that calm place. Calm place. He can do this. And if he can’t… well. He can. He has to. 

Announcing that he has a plan, Mac takes off. Morgan grabs the nearest member of his team, telling Prentiss they need to extend the perimeter, and while he takes care of that, Mac darts around looking for the pieces of the puzzle. It comes together in his hands, a coiled cord, a spool of yellow caution tape, a wheel. Someone tries to stop him and ask what he’s doing at one point, but Morgan cuts in, flashing his badge and ordering a path cleared. 

Whatever Riley and Patty were doing to keep Jack calm seems to be working, enough that by the time Mac returns with a crate full of supplies and a head buzzing with ideas, he’s able to do his part. His hands are shaking in minute trembles when Mac passes things to him, but not enough to keep him from being able to secure the cobbled together device to the pin. 

“I’m gonna need a little distance to make this work,” Mac says, mostly to himself, when it’s all put together. Jack’s alarmed ‘what?’ takes him by surprise, not entirely realizing he’d spoken out loud, and Mac looks up. 

Jack looks terrified. As terrified as Mac feels, way down in the presently locked up part of himself that feels things. Seeing it reaches down in him and _yanks,_ nearly cracking that part open and spilling out everything he needs to keep down there if he’s going to be able to do this. So Mac forces his face into something like a smile, and lets himself have a moment to remember his father’s trial. The long grey evenings after on the couch with Bozer and Jack, the way Jack had looked at him, the way he’d spoke to him then. Mac remembers and tries to channel some of that, hoping that he can give some of it back now, the safety and steady reassurance of it, how it really seemed like everything would impossibly find a way to be okay, just because Jack said it would.

“Don’t worry. I’m coming back for you. I’m gonna get you out of this.” Saying it has the added benefit that Mac feels himself start to believe it that much harder. Before he can take off, though, Jack's voice forces him to grind to a halt for a second time.

“Hey, Mac.” The words are gentle and kind, exactly as they’d been in that memory. It hurts, but it hurts worse when he keeps going, when Jack looks at him with eyes that shine bright and says, “Whatever happens here, it’s not your fault, okay?” It does crack this time, that locked place, fear and pain and _no, no, please, no, please,_ spilling out into the space in Mac’s ribcage left behind by lungs he’s sure must have completely collapsed. “It was never your fault.”

“I should’ve been here.” Mac can’t help it, the words he’d said to Morgan returning now, feeling like acid when he says them. “I was supposed to _be_ here, Jack, I’m so sorry I-”

Jack cuts him off just like Morgan had, at the same time Riley’s hand closes around his forearm, gripping tightly through his jacket. 

“No, stop that.” It’s the world’s least forceful rebuke, Jack’s forehead twisting as he shakes his head. “You’re gonna listen to me once in your fool life, Mac, and it’s gonna be now. This was not and will _never_ be your fault. Understand?”

Mac won’t ever forget the first time Jack looked at him like that, with that incomprehensible, fierce affection. They’d been working EOD still, and it was a lull between one rushed, hard day and the next. Jack had been watching him carefully fix a broken zipper on his sleeve, and when Mac looked up, there it was. _What?_ he’d asked, and Jack had just shaken his head and turned back out towards the road. 

He can’t agree, can’t say yes and concede the point, but Mac doesn’t argue again, and Jack seems to take the win for what it is. Riley’s hand doesn’t leave his arm just yet, and when Mac looks at her, their eyes lock. The overflow that managed to escape that lockbox in him, the things rattling around and threatening to shake him right to pieces, it’s in her too, in her face and in her voice when she asks, “Can you do this? Is it going to work?”

Morgan hasn’t spoken and Mac can’t see him, but he can feel the presence behind him, the reminder. _They need you._ He swallows hard, grits his teeth, and nods. Mac twists his arm around to catch Riley's hand in his, squeezing her fingers and feeling her squeeze back. He looks from Riley, to Jack, to Patty, and shoots a quick glance over at Morgan.

“I’ve got this.”

The plan works exactly the way it’s supposed to. The pin pulls out straight, dropping so quietly Mac can’t hear it from this far away, and then he’s off, sprinting back towards the truck and yelling for Jack to keep still. He probably could’ve asked Morgan to do it, to cut the wire under the pressure plate as soon as the pin was out, but that was a leap of faith Mac couldn’t take, not with his family on the line. So he runs over himself, catches the knife when Jack hands it to him. The red wire snaps in two under the pressure from his blade, the green following shortly behind it, and it’s over.

Just like that, it’s over. 

Mac collapses onto the step at the back of the truck, feeling as if his entire body’s gone to jello. His blood pressure sounds like the ocean in his ears, feeling rather than hearing it when Jack drops down next to him. The whole long, horrible day surges up at once and Mac crumples to the side, beyond caring about the chaos and crowd of a crime scene as his forehead knocks into Jack’s collarbone. Jack catches him easily, and Mac can feel the tremors in the arm braced tight around his back, the palm rubbing his shoulder. 

Over the top of his head, Mac can hear Riley and Jack joke back and forth, the quiet laugh that belongs to Patty, an unfamiliar snort of a chuckle that must be Morgan. Voices buzz and blur together and Mac feels suddenly exhausted. He’s not sure how long he sits there, leaning against Jack, feeling them both slowly stop shaking. Jack’s heart, where Mac can hear it next to his head, is calming and evening out. Feeling Jack’s adrenaline soaked fear ebb away has a mirrored effect on Mac, and eventually, he’s able to sit back up straight, clearing his throat and looking at the ground. 

Nobody says anything about his momentary lapse, the childish way he’s just acted going unremarked on in a moment of grace that Mac appreciates. Riley sits down on Jack’s other side while Patty flags down Agent Prentiss and begins a hushed, serious conversation with her. 

“MacGyver.” The use of his full last name in a low, graveled voice startles Mac into focusing on one piece of input, and he turns to see Hotch standing by Morgan. “Can I have a word with you?”

There’s a small spike of anxiety at the concept, given what happened the last time this team asked for ‘a word’ with him, but before Mac can say anything, Riley beats him to the punch.

“He didn’t do it,” she says, eyes and voice flint. “You can’t seriously look at-”

“We know.” Hotch’s reassurance is warm and kind, the way Mac can remember Rossi sounding in that interview years ago, when they’d first met. “We don’t believe he’s responsible for anything, trust me, I just want to have a quick word. It’ll just be a moment and then I’ll bring your friend right back.” 

Hotch pauses, waiting for agreement. Not just from Mac, he realizes, but from Jack and Riley too, Patty, who has looked over and noticed. He wants the team’s permission, before he takes Mac away even for a moment, and something about that makes Mac settle. It feels safer, somehow, to agree now, knowing that if they decided it was a risk it wouldn’t happen, and so he nods. And so does Riley, though her brow still furrows, wary and just a hint resentful. 

Mac follows Hotch a short ways away, still within eyesight of his team but where they won’t be heard over the sound of the rest of the scene progressing around them.

“Agent Rossi wanted to apologize for what happened in the interrogation today,” Hotch tells him. Before Mac can ask, he goes on, explaining. “I asked him to let me speak to you instead, on behalf of my team. I do apologize for that, we didn’t have the whole picture.” 

There’s a laden pause, and Mac shakes his head, offering a wry smile. “I still can’t give it to you, either.”

“I had a feeling you were going to say that. Our office looked into your boss, over there, Patricia Thornton, and ran into firewalls not even our technical analyst could get past. I don’t have to ask to know what that means.” There’s a focused intensity in the way Hotch is looking at him, dark eyes piercing and unwavering. Mac wants to look away but doesn’t, steeling his nerves and holding steady. “I meant what I said, though. I am sorry. We all are.”

“Well, thank you, but like I told Agent Morgan when he apologized at the station, I get it. You were just doing your job. I probably would have suspected me too.” 

There’s a slight twitch in Hotch’s forehead, brows knitting together and his head tilting to the side just a bit. He’s studying Mac, and Mac doesn’t know what he’s looking for or what he finds. Mac feels young and exposed, he feels like he’s just returned from the army and the FBI is on his porch again. 

“There is one part in particular I wanted to touch back on,” Hotch says after those empty, scrutinizing moments. “Your father.” Mac flinches, too out of sorts to hide it, and he knows Hotch sees it when he does. “You aren’t like him.” 

Swallowing around the lump in his throat, Mac can’t find it in himself to speak. He doesn’t know what he’d say if he could. Apparently, Hotch doesn’t have the same problem.

“I didn’t interview James MacGyver personally, but I watched when Agent Rossi did. I studied him, I know what sort of man he is, and I’ve known dozens like him. Hundreds. You aren’t one of them. Not after what I saw here today. Sons… Sons do not have to grow into the footsteps of their fathers.” There’s an odd quality to it when Hotch speaks again, after a lurching lull that indicates he’d almost not continued at all. “I would know. We all have our choices. His don’t take anything away from yours.”

When he accepts the hand that’s held out to him, shaking it firmly, Mac still doesn’t have ahold of his voice. Hotch doesn’t wait for him to regain it either, turning and walking away to where Patty is talking to Prentiss and Morgan. Mac watches him go, his eyes shifting from Hotch’s retreating back to where Jack and Riley have now risen from the step at the back of the truck and are walking towards him. 

“Ready to head home?” Jack calls over to him.

Taking a deep breath in, Mac lets it out slowly. He smiles when they reach him, small and unsteady but genuine, and says, “Yeah. Let’s go home.”


End file.
